The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

It all sounds rather dramatic, doesn't it? A commentator admits to error and reverses a previously held opinion, what larks, what high jinks!

However, as M'Lord Keynes once pointed out when the facts change it is necessary to at least reconsider one's views and thus possibly alter one's conclusions to fit those new facts.

I've long been on the other side of the argument from Mike Daisey about the conditions in those Foxconn factories in China where Apple (and most other electronics manufacturers) source their kit. My view is that China is still a relatively poor country and thus it's no surprise that people work long hours in not very good conditions for low wages. This is what poverty actually is, long hours, bad conditions and low wages.

However, when the This American Life furore erupted I defended Daisey in part. For I accept that there's a very large difference between the sort of twisting and manipulation of events that we accept, even welcome, in theatre and what is acceptable in what is billed as journalism.

For he’s right, theatre does indeed play by different rules than journalism and as long as we know the difference between the two then we’ll not be misled. Daisey’s error was to insist, at least at first, that his manipulation of events and stories was true in every detail, was in fact journalism when he knew that it was not, that it was a theatrical and thus manipulated attempt to tug on the emotional heartstrings of his audience.

Which is where my defence comes in: I think it’s just fine to manipulate an audience, to tell them half truths, even to make up events entirely in order to get at those emotions. No one really thinks that Romeo and Juliet went down just like Shakespeare said (nor even the Leonard Bernstein or Mark Knopfler versions) but we’ve been queueing up for centuries to be so lied to. Even when The Bard was obviously correct as to the righteous course of action (“First, we kill all the lawyers” has always appeared pretty sound to me) we know that it’s something said by a character to contribute to the overall truthiness of the entire experience.

To my mind the error was to present as journalism something composed to the quite different standards of theatre. However, I'm afraid that I've now got to withdraw that defence. Alerted by a friend I am directed to this piece about the genesis of Daisey's Steve Jobs show.

For months and months four major non-profit organizations across the US (Seattle Rep, Berkeley Rep, Woolly and the Public Theater) worked to put TATESJ on the stage, bringing the story we all felt was so enormously important – a story Mike told at least me time and time again was true. He insisted that “This is a work of non-fiction” be printed in playbills. This was to be a work of activist theatre. Staff at Woolly handed out sheets of paper to every audience member that left our theatres, per Mike’s insistence, that urged them to take action on this matter. (I and other staffers would get nasty emails from him the next day if even one audience member slipped by without collecting this call to action.) As the head of the marketing staff at Woolly, my staff and I worked hard to get butts in seats, and it worked. We sold out our houses. As in the other cities where Mike appeared, we got Mike in every major news outlet in DC, and the buzz, hype and importance of the show only grew along the way.

And then what happened? We learned from a radio producer, a year later, that Mike’s facts weren’t true. And what Mike did was apologize to him, to Ira. But he never apologized to us, and he never apologized to our audiences. In fact, what he did in his retraction interview was say, “I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theatre that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.” My answer to that is that “This is a work of non-fiction” is pretty clear language.

So I'm afraid that I was overgenerous to Daisey. My assumption had been that he had knowingly composed the piece to those different theatre standards, those ones where emotional manipulation are not just allowed but positively encouraged in pursuit of the structure of the story, but had then either not been clear on what the necessary journalistic standards were or, perhaps slightly less generously, he'd been overwhelmed by this invitation to perform the show on the radio to that massive audience and had simply glossed over the differences in the two required standards.

I regard either of the two above as nothing worse than peccadilloes, certainly understandable temptations when a one man off Broadway and public theatre show is offered a national platform.

However, as above I'm now presented with this new fact, that all along he was insisting that the show was entirely true, nonfictional to every degree. At which point then he loses that defence of using the theatrical conventions even in presenting his monologue in theatres.

Think of it this way: the hit novel Child 44 is loosely based on the Chikatilo killings but the author is quite open about the fact that pretty much everything has been moved around to contribute to the story he really wanted to tell which is really just using Chikatilo as a plot device. And if that's what you want to do and we all know about it then that's just great.

However, Robert Conquest averred in The Great Terror that he was telling us the truth, was giving us a nonfiction account of what really happened. Very much the same events (no, not Chikatilo, but Stalinism), the time span, are covered in the novel and the history book: but we clearly and obviously hold them to different standards about their allowable moving around of events and invention of characters in order to tell those similar stories (clearly, I regard both of them as being about the horror of living under totalitarianism).

If Daisey had claimed the theatrical exemption in the theatre for his inventions then I would be just fine with those inventions. But he didn't, he's all along been claiming that this is not simply theatre, this is nonfiction, something which we hold to different standards. At which point, as above, I withdraw my partial defence of his actions.

One more thing to reiterate: I still insist that Daisey's been wildly wrong all along about the implications of the conditions in those factories. Quite true that they're not conditions that we would like to be subject to but that's not the point at all. The comparison is to what else is available to those who do voluntarily work in them. As their alternatives include 12 hours a day staring at the southern end of a north moving water buffalo perhaps assembling iPads isn't so bad?